


Epilogues

by Alley_Skywalker



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2018-08-12 22:56:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7952491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alley_Skywalker/pseuds/Alley_Skywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens after the end? </p><p>A collection of ficlets set post-canon featuring <strike>almost all</strike> maybe about half of all possible Great Comet ship combinations. Each “chapter” is a separate fic dedicated to one ship. Fics are not necessarily all set in the same continuity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A New Life Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> INDEX OF SHIPS/CHAPTERS 
> 
> 1 - Pierre/Natasha  
> 2 - Dolokhov/Anatole  
> 3 - Pierre/Andrey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pierre/Natasha. A year has passed since the events of Great Comet and it's Natasha's name day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ficlet was initially published separately, but is now the first part in this collection.

_How silly I am to be nervous and awkward,_ Pierre thought, standing in the Rostovs’ sitting room. _After all, this is Natasha. The girl I’ve known since she was a child._ But of course it wasn’t that simple. The girl Pierre knew was now a beautiful woman, a woman he had seen once in her most vulnerable state and to whom he had offered his heart. 

She had not accepted him then, and, well, he had not had much to offer her. For he had been a married man and not free. But so much had changed in the last year – the divorce for one. The fact that he had found it in himself to propose, another. That she had accepted him – third and most amazing of all. Sometimes, Pierre felt bad about it. It felt somehow disloyal to Andrei to be happy with the woman who had rejected him. But Pierre could not help loving her and he had been there when Andrei had so obviously turned his back on her. 

Pierre could not say he blamed his friend. After everything that had happened, Andrei had every right… But that did nothing to change the fact that Pierre had picked up the pieces of Natasha’s broken heart and tenderly sown them back together with awkward dinner visits, soft looks and kind words. Until she finally felt free and alive again. She began to sing once more and Pierre had slowly abandoned all his dusty books in favor of visiting many days in a row at the Rostovs and staying for long hours. 

Now he stood in the drawing room waiting for his fiancé, happy to have beaten the rest of her name day guests there. Pierre had agonized in his usual indecisive manner over what present to bring her. He heard that girls liked pretty things, precious things, glittering trinkets and such. But, finally, Pierre had settled on some sheet music not readily available in Russia but which a friend of his who had gone to Paris recently had been able to procure. After all, Natasha’s singing and music-making was one of the things that Pierre loved the most about her. 

“Pierre!” He turned to see Natasha standing in the doorway. “Oh, you’re here!” She ran to him and threw her arms around him. “How wonderful!” She looked up at him with her beady, dark eyes, her hair already coming undone from its bun. 

“Natasha. Happy name day.” He kissed her hand, still shy around her as though hardly able to believe she was finally his. 

Natasha gave him a small pout. “Oh do kiss me proper!” 

He obliged, wrapping his large arms around her small waist lightly and pressing his lips to hers. 

“Oh, dear old Pierre,” she laughed, pulling away. “Always the same.”

Pierre flushed but pressed on, taking out the handsomely wrapped package he had prepared. “I got you a gift. Well, I—“ Was it fair to say that he had gotten it, when someone else actually did the getting and he merely asked that it be gotten? Well, it was all the same anyway, wasn’t it? “Yes, I got you a present.”

“Oh, thank you!” She ripped it open and inspected the sheets of music with some awe. “Oh, Pierre, these are gorgeous! Come, come, I must show mama and then try to play some. Come, we will sing duet.”

“Oh I’m rather bad at singing.” 

“Nonsense, come!” She grabbed his hand and led him to greet the rest of the family. Pierre followed her, wondering at how full of life she was. He was happy that he could add to that, be part of that. That he made her happy. He was right that night when he saw the comet and felt like a new life was beginning. It truly was.


	2. Say Yes To This

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dolokhov/Anatole. The elopement has failed and Anatole figures out that Dolokhov had wanted it to fail all along.

“Anatole. Anatole—agh—wait.”

Anatole doesn’t wait. He hurtles down the hall, stunning the footmen, and bursts into the study. “How could this happen!”

Dolokhov nearly has to shove a footman out of the way to follow him. He closes the door behind them and stands with his arms folded across his chest, watching Anatole pace. 

“Why would she—how could this—?” He puts his face in his hands for a moment, frustration coming off of him in waves, the adrenaline slowly draining from his system, leaving him shaky and pale. Finally, he looks up at Dolokhov who had been watching him the entire time. 

“I did tell you it was a bad idea, didn’t I?”

“It’s all your fault!” Anatole concludes after a brief pause. 

Dolokhov feels his eyebrows crawl up his forehead. “My fault!”

“Yes. You jinxed it.”

“Seriously?”

“You kept going on and on about how eloping was stupid, how I would tire of Natasha quickly, how we would run out of money, how—everything. You kept saying that it wouldn’t work as though you didn’t want it to work.”

Dolokhov’s expression closed, he nearly growled in frustration, Anatole’s obvious misery both upsetting and annoying. “I _didn’t_ want it to work.”

“What! Why? You helped me!”

“Yes, because otherwise, you would have simply done it yourself and cocked the whole thing up and I was just…just… _bloody hell._ ”

“Just what?” Anatole demanded, stepping closer to him, anger and confusion mixing behind his eyes. _Those beautiful eyes._

“I wanted to keep you safe.”

Anatole stops, amazement flickering across his face. 

Dolokhov almost growls again, offended that after everything he had ever done for Anatole, and all their time together, Anatole still had a hard time believing that their friendship was worthwhile to him. Did even Anatole think him so completely incapable of feeling? Nevertheless, he presses on. “But I did not want you to leave. Up until tonight, I really thought you wouldn’t.”

Anatole takes several quick steps toward him, stops, looks into his face. They are chest-to-chest, almost touching. “Did you set me up?” he demands. 

Dolokhov shakes his head, attempting to look earnest. Not because he is lying, but because he has long forgotten how to not put up a façade to the rest of the world. “No. Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous.” 

“But did you want to? To make me stay.”

Anatole is so close, eyes wide, lips slightly parted.

Dolokhov gives in. “Yes.” 

For a moment, they stand still, looking at each other, searching for the lie in the other’s face, the fatal flaw. Then Anatole closes the distance between them and kisses him on the mouth, full and assertive, without any hesitation. 

After a moment, with much regret, Dolokhov pushes him back. He attempts a sneer. “What are you—“ 

“This is what you want, isn’t it? Of course it is, it must be. You—“

Dolokhov grabs Anatole by the shoulders and turns him around so their positions are reversed, then backs him up against the wall, gives him a good shove, his hands pinning down Anatole’s shoulders. Anatole is slightly startled but not at all afraid, an insolent flicker of desire dancing at the edges of his eyes. It’s more than Dolokhov can handle. He kisses the fool of a boy hard, rough, setting free all his frustration and pent up desire. “How dare you,” he hisses, pulling back just slightly. “You think you can get away with this? Just do whatever you want?”

Anatole, breathless, says, “Yes, yes. Do it again.”

Dolokhov wonders briefly what _exactly_ it is that Anatole is agreeing with if with anything at all. But he does as told nonetheless, kissing Anatole until they both can hardly breath. “I should throw you out,” he growls. 

“You could,” Anatole agrees, his hands coming up to rest on Dolokhov’s forearms, slither over his chest and around his neck. Anatole makes no attempts to extract himself from Dolokhov’s hold. “Or you could kiss me again and we can forget that tonight ever happened.” 

“What about Pierre? Didn’t he tell you to leave Moscow?”

“What do I care what he wants?”

“You probably better play along. Wouldn’t want him to _actually_ inflict violence on you. Besides, he’s right. Once Bolkonsky gets here…if you’re still around, it’s a duel waiting to happen.” 

Anatole groans and wiggles under Dolokhov’s hands. “Fine. I will go to Petersburg. But _later._ ” Dolokhov looks unconvinced. Anatole loses some of his smugness. “Please.” 

Dolokhov has never been able to say no to him.


	3. Considerations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pierre/Andrey. Andrey is dead-set on dueling Anatole, unless Pierre can give him a reason to reconsider. (Could be read as one-sided or not.)

“I’m sorry it all happened like it did,” Pierre says quietly from his corner. He watches Andrey clean the twin dueling pistols with an expression of the deepest unhappiness. “But this is not necessarily.”

“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.” 

Andrey’s tone is cold, and it makes Pierre shiver, despite the blazing fireplace. 

“He’s not even in Moscow anymore.”

“He will be one day again. Or I may go to Petersburg. There are always things to do in the capital.”

“This isn’t like you—”

“Pierre!”

Pierre nearly jumps from the shock of it. Andrey has never snapped like that at him before. Coldness and contempt are Andrei’s weapons. Not this. It is a mark of how deeply affected his friend has been by his fiancé’s rejection. Pierre feels his stomach knot up with guilt and worry. As enraged as he had been at the near-ruin of a young girl whose liveliness and beauty he admired, and as offended as he had been on Andrey’s behalf, there had been a small part of him that could not help being almost _relieved_ that things worked out the way they did. That Andrey would not take Natasha back, that the wedding is off.

He hates himself for the feeling, as small as it is, and as much as he tells himself he would have never wished for Andrey’s unhappiness. Or Natasha’s. 

But it had been so hard to hear of their engagement. It had been so hard to love someone while they loved another. 

What is the purpose of feeling guilty over something he had had no control over and would have never wished for? And Pierre suffers now almost as much as he would have suffered at Natasha’s and Andrey’s wedding for Andrey’s pain is almost as difficult to bear as his own despair. 

And more pressingly: he had nearly lost Andrey to marriage, he certainly is not going to lose him to death. 

Pierre takes a step forward, then another, until finally Andrey looks up from the pistols to meet his eyes. 

“What if I told you that I don’t want you to do this because I am afraid of losing you?”

Andrey almost smiles. “Do you think my chances so poor against Kuragin?”

“I dueled Dolokhov while you were away. And won—It feels strange to say won about such a thing as this. Well, he—he was the one who got shot… You simply don’t know with duels. Anything could happen.”

Andrey sighs and drops into a chair, rubbing a hand over his face. Pierre comes to stand beside him. “I cannot let it lie like this. He seduced my fiancé. That is an affront to me.”

“You said yourself that Natasha was free before you left. Nor is she a child or a possession. It is no bad reflection on you if she chose to give herself to another. That choice is hers.” 

Andrey laughs softly. “You always make things sound so much better and easier than they are. Yet you dueled over Helene.”

“Dolokhov was mocking me. It was different.”

Andrey looks up at him again and Pierre takes his hand, holding it tightly. He wants to say it so badly, all the things that he feels, but he doesn’t know how to begin, or what Andrey would think. He was raised in a household of stringent morals, after all. 

Andrey presses his hand and brings it to his lips for just a moment. “For the sake of your peace of mind, Pierre, I will—perhaps—reconsider.”


End file.
